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The Other Candidates In South Carolina’s Special 5th Congressional District

South Carolina’s 5th congressional district holds a special election today to replace Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney left the district to help Donald Trump enact a highly regressive economic policy as the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The 5th congressional district is dominated by right wing religious ideology. The Republican candidate, Ralph Norman, has run a heavily religious campaign as a “dedicated Christian”. He promises to use the power of the federal government to give privileges to members of his own religion, declaring that, “I will empower middle class families in South Carolina; those frustrated with government, those who understand the value of personal responsibility, and those who believe in the virtues of faith in God.”

The Democratic candidate in the race, Archie Parnell, supports a more progressive vision of America in which the federal government serves all people. “Our nation is built on the idea that all people are created equal and our Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law,” Parnell says. Nonetheless, Norman is expected to win.

The race isn’t just between Norman and Parnell, however. There are three other candidates in South Carolina’s 5th district election today.

Josh Thornton offers a perspective that is simultaneously unfamiliar and thoroughly precedented. Thornton is unusual in that he is proposing the creation and growth of a new political party. What’s not unusual at all is what Thornton envisions his new political party to be: Something that everyone can agree upon. He calls it the American Party, and the idea seems to be to simply work on a centrist vision that all Americans support. He claims that he can “Bring Unity Back to Congress”, ignoring that Congress was divided from the very beginning of the United States, and pretending that the majority of voters in South Carolina’s 5th congressional district don’t support a highly divisive partisan agenda. Thornton doesn’t seem to grasp the irony in his pledge to end partisan divisions through the creation of a new political party.

A more serious approach is presented by David Kulma, the district’s Green Party candidate. Kulma proposes that health care, education, and shelter be recognized as human rights that society should provide to all people. He supports action on climate change, pledges to oppose authorizations for further war, supports sanctuary cities, and is running on a platform of economic justice.

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.